The use of mobile phones and wireless broadband has increased rapidly during the last decade, and it is expected to grow even faster the coming years. To meet the expected demands, the operators will have to increase the capacity in the communication systems. One way to do this is to deploy more base stations and use smaller cells, such that a more efficient spatial reuse can be utilized and the capacity of the system can be increased. But with many small cells and a dense deployment of base stations, the so-called co-channel interference between different cells will probably be increased. The large amount of base stations will also result in a higher energy consumption which will cost a lot of money and has a negative environmental effect.
The load of a typical cell varies over the day, but typically, the load is relatively low. Unfortunately, the base stations consume quite much power even though there is no data transmitted
Therefore there is a need for reducing the output power of the base stations, for example by turning off power amplifiers when not needed. Previously, this has been done as so-called antenna muting, which basically means that one or several antennas and their corresponding radio chains are turned of when they are not needed. However, this means that relatively expensive equipment is unused during certain times.
There is thus a need for a more efficient handling of reduction of power consumption, at the same time as the base station equipment is used as efficiently as possible.